Earliest Memory - Adopted Imprint Moment

Earliest Memory - Adopted Imprint Moment

As I have begun to open up the vaults of my memories I've lately been exploring through a very wide variety of colorful experiences I can share.

Many are emerging as extremely formative and I'm beginning to see some patterns in it all that I had not yet previously considered, which is exciting because it tells me that if this whole community ends up being just a hollow echo chamber where I'm speaking to the vast emptiness and that's as far as it ever goes, then at least maybe some kind of purpose is yet to be found in that alone.

Maybe that's the best thing for an arrogant person to discover anyhow. Some reason to realize that ego doesn't need validating, just letting go of.

So with so many memories surfacing, I keep thinking of that classic line, "Perhaps we'd better start at the beginning."

What is the beginning exactly?

Sometimes I think I can get a flicker of a memory of some kind that has no bearing trying to make physical sense of, some kind of pre-life existence where lives are being explored and the option to choose to incarnate is always somehow at hand.

Almost like sitting in on an incarnation auction you don't really expect to ever buy anything at, but hey, who knows, right?

One life path came up for consideration and the details were so daunting that even the 'jocks' and 'alphas' of the spirit realm, the serious buyers so to speak, were recoiling, as if it was a suicide mission or even worse.

I understood my position in this dream-realm was something along the lines of 'that strange polka-dotted creature that chases its own tail and is likely to be found somewhere in Orion's belt when he was supposed to be on mission in the Pleiades (but makes for a perfectly fine cat).

Since I WAS known to have failed everything I'd ever been sent to do, an avoider of effort and an irresponsible divine intervention-reliant fool, I decided that I would go ahead and opt-in for this horror of horrors of a life path.

Specifically because everyone was daunted by it. I'm not sure I even worried much about coming to understand the details before jumping in yelling 'cannonball!'

Everyone turned to regard me as if to say, "You cannot possibly be serious about this. Blah blah consequence for failure, blah blah pain, blah blah chance of success less than fitting a camel through the eye of a needle" and so on.

I believe I felt that if I was going to keep screwing off it would probably be the perfect life path to grandly screw up and begged for the opportunity to use this life-path to make good on all the mistakes I'd ever made before by stepping into this role nobody else wanted anyhow.

Warnings kept ensuing and they only served to fuel my curiosity - I mean how bad could it actually BE? Nobody gets stuck anywhere forever, right? The threat is always there but ... meh.

Whomever the 'judge' was in the case decided, ok, let him take it if he's willing. Someone needs to anyhow.

Yay! I get to be a ... what did they call that? A Human? Experiencing the entire span of the Great Awakening? They did say it would be a very colorful show so I just got a grand ticket to ride. My spirit tail flicked with intense anticipation.

And the next thing I know I'm opening my eyes to a great light in a delivery room and screaming my head off and then I forget the rest.

That's probably all just totally made up garbage and it doesn't have much solidity to it whatsoever - just filler as a result of even trying to envision what the before-life is like. I figure it stems from the realization that our fear of the afterlife is an extension of feeling a complete disconnection from any 'before-life' experiences.

If there isn't anything to remember before, then all we are left with is a huge question of what comes after so we rightfully live in terror of the unknown of death.

We may just adhere to religion because it tries to tell us, with completely unfounded confidence, what will happen when we close our eyes forever. I tried to understand the experience as I looked into my dog's eyes as the drugs removed him from his body. I couldn't even pinpoint the moment really.

The truth is I don't know if I can believe when people say they can remember past lives. Being skeptical of my own spirituality, I can't attest to knowledge of the truth of any kind of out of body or out of life experience at all.

But I can imagine and wonder if that imagination is a band-aid. I asked my Grandmother once what she thought about the afterlife and in her greatly aging wisdom, she shared she didn't really think there WAS anything that would happen after you pass, only that you die and stop thinking, experiencing, being, and that's it.

I don't really know if I CAN believe that because if time stops for anyone, did anything actually happen? Surely there cannot BE an end to experience and if there cannot be an end, there couldn't possibly have been an actual beginning.

So really, to start AT the beginning for me, simply means going back as far as I KNOW I really do remember. For most people, you press them on how far back their memories can go and I find it fascinating that it's usually a great deal after this point of youth for me.

I think when I was young I was practicing hard trying to remember and lock in memories and perhaps that had something to do with having been adopted at about a year and a half. Maybe so much changed so suddenly that I found it incredibly important to start building the logging capacity in the brain matter as much as I could because it was all very confusing and somehow threatening in a way.

I can reach back to grab onto a sadness in it, a feeling of abandonment, and I'm pretty sure as an infant, my birth mother was emotionally the center of everything I cared about outside of not being in pain, hungry, bored or whatever. I've been told, later in life, that I experienced a lot of being in a crib alone, which totally fits to an unusual strength now, spending productive time in isolation is pretty comfortable.

But none of that is actually a 'memory'.

What IS a memory, is the moment I realized that the two adults next to me were going to be my people from there on. I remember, distinctly, sitting between them on the long sun-consuming black vinyl seat of the Ford truck that would be at least one mainstay throughout my entire childhood through high school and a little beyond.

Yellow. The truck was then and always the most canary yellow color. Later, Dad would go on to get a CB radio and the immediate and most obvious name to give the truck as a handle was 'Big Bird'. Because that's what it was. The truck version of Big Bird. With an evil seat that would sear the skin off of exposed legs.

I'm pretty sure I was very overheated, as would've been a regular experience for those days when we had no air-conditioning aside from rolling down the windows... to later be called dual-vent AC.

I can honestly say that, around this moment, I remember my adopted mother saying they should've taken the air conditioning option and my father continuing to defend the choice not to take that option so as to be able to afford the vehicle.

I don't think they were having that argument in this moment though. I recall this being a peaceful silence actually.

Maybe 'Mom' had just sprayed me with her highly innovative approach to trying to help me survive the Las Vegas area summer heat, a misting spray bottle that I do distinctly recall helped to quell the feeling of becoming a melting tomato face.

I'm not sure what it was that suddenly hit me but that first memory, vague as it may have been, was a moment that struck like a sudden zapping realization that went all the way to the core of my being, to realize at a truly intuitive level that this was beyond just 'hanging out' with the latest crazy strangers that were taking care of me.

Maybe it came from a realization of how long I had been with them and that it was beyond the normal span of time of a usual hand-off.

Much later in life I was informed I had been passed around a few families for stretches of days to help my birth mother, a reasonably young teen of 16 at the time and trying to get through school and jobs to support me.

These two had been around longer than just a few days, maybe even longer than a couple of weeks, and it seemed to suddenly hit me that they might be my people from here on.

I looked up at both of them with that really deep attention that felt like I was imprinting on them or accepting an imprint from them. I truly took in an in-depth observation of who they were finally.

This was not to say it was a feeling that came with appreciation or a sense of being owned or possessed, any optimism nor pessimism, just absolute unjudging observation. Perhaps it was the onset of a curiosity as to what this would actually mean now.

I'm sure they'd like me to say it was a moment where I felt an overwhelming kind of bonding love - maybe something like that WAS happening, as I do think it was a moment where I decided I could truly trust them. Truth is, I don't think 'love' was something my already calloused nature in this regard was actually capable of feeling the way most children might understand it.

Bonding and trust extended in that moment, over time grew into the usual child-like faith in them. Much the same as many extend to an idea of a God-Deity, that later led to all those grade school arguments about how your Dad told you a 'fact', so clearly it's true even if the other kid's Dad said some other stupid thing. Peak debate skills.

I believe from a spiritual perspective, one could say it felt a little like accepting a 'brand', letting my true being's 'energetic field' blend with theirs finally, reaching out to enable a Venn diagram overlap in who I am to finally be truly influenced by the beings they were from that moment on.

I don't think that 'bubble' actually burst until high school where I began to feel it was absolutely necessary to realize they were people with limits and that their worldviews were potentially incorrect or incomplete so I could explore beyond that all for myself.

They did always raise me to explore religions without bias, though would admit to being vaguely Christian, though I think it was a cover for a deeply divided internal atheism vs religion clash. That was mostly Dad. Mom, I think, just didn't really decide until after their divorce to turn more completely to a religious and Christian world-view.

I would go on to have incredible power struggles with them, which is for some reason the most foundational aspect of my nature is to resist the entire concept of authority over my decisions, a selfish absorption of a struggle to exist without guidance.

I did and still do clearly admire them both deeply for their decision to take me in and treat me as their own, particularly in light of the fact that I never had to compete with a sibling for attention. Funny to think I did want a sibling when I was younger.

I would go on to sponge and absorb a LOT of individual attention from them, and even pick up a very false presumption that since I was the center of their universe, or that they did what they could to give me an upbringing that felt like I was, that I would go on to be at least noteworthy in the minds of others I would meet.

Insufferable, right? What a way to start off on the wrong foot with so many people until I realized it was a horrible mistake to assume I meant something just because I was there.

Anyhow, the truck ride ended who knows where, but that sudden click was a powerful switch that was flipped. One that wasn't truly lost until my adopted Mother passed a few years ago, an event I'm accused of handling all too well while personally, I feel like I still have yet to truly accept or even understand. Still reeling really. For all of our incredible conflicts, I'll always appreciate my Mother and deeply miss her. Even if I did curse the ground she walked on at times because of my own inability to live up to her hopes and guidelines.

Thankfully, later this weekend I still get to spend some time with my Dad, whom although we share some very deep disagreements and I've disappointed and led on a completely unfair emotional roller coaster through my wild life, I still appreciate and know someday I will come to regret not being so much closer to.

Perhaps that's why I needed to write this today. So I could be more open? Dad and I can sit in a room together for a while not knowing what to say to one another and it can weird out onlookers as well as ourselves. It's been getting a little easier lately - on the phone at least. We'll see how this goes.

Hopefully we can dodge politics and really clashing this time. Maybe we can just enjoy each other's company.

As I hope we all can together here.